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Minnesota is also likely to have an issue with Blue Jays pitching as well, and the two pitching staffs as a whole have posted basically interchangeable whole season numbers to the point if you did an A/B comparison of the numbers side by side you'd be hard pressed to choose which team was which. The Twins definitely get the edge in the rotation with the 1-2 punch of Gray and Lopez which could see the Jays in trouble scoring runs. One thing which may help the Jays out in the wild card round is that they are a much better offense on the road vs at home. The home/road splits are pretty remarkable, as they are the 6th highest scoring club in MLB away from Rogers Center, but that moves down to 25th at home. I had a look at the Jays runs scored and runs allowed at home and away, and their home offense is so bad that they have all of a +5 run differential at home vs a run differential of +63 on the road. Tampa is so injury depleted that I can see them bowing out of the playoffs rather early depending on who makes it back to health in time for the playoffs.

That's very noble of you.

Chapman had a really nice month of July as well. It would be nice to at least see that version of Chapman vs the guy with the noodle bat who's making mistakes defensively as well.

I'm kind of torn whether I want him to come back to the Jays. On the one hand he might be a good depth piece given the resurgence in AAA. He was suddenly getting whiffs for days. But on the other hand if he succeeds as a Jay we'll never here the end of it from Terminator. I'm sure you can see my dilemma.

This might boil down to whether White thinks he will receive a legitimate opportunity to compete for a major league job next season.

You need to start paying attention for once. Espinal is one of the team's hottest hitters right now and has produced a ton of important hits lately. Over his last 18 games the dude has a 175 WRC+. He's the team's 4th most valuable position player over this span with 0.5 FWAR. But of course you want to bitch and moan like usual even when a guy is white hot at the plate and really helping the team win.

A lot of the Jays hitting issues are centered in their inability to hit for power at the Rogers Center. They have hit 103 home runs away from the Rogers Center but only 77 at home. It seems as though the offseason outfield changes potentially changed the Rogers Center to an extreme pitchers park this season. Perhaps the upcoming reduction of foul territory will help to balance this out a little bit moving forward.

Moreno is a poor framer by every available metric. He gains a huge boost from DRS adjusted catcher ERA which from what I can gather is a measure of game calling ability behind the plate. Perhaps the Yadier Molina comp is still valid, just not in the realm of framing. https://fieldingbible.com/Fielding-Bible-FAQ.asp

This is a team full of players that have hit for a lot of power in previous seasons so it's not outside the realm of possibility the power bats show up for the playoffs. There are guys like Vlad with 30-40 home run power, and all of Bo, Chapman, Springer and Varsho are capable of 25 home runs in a season so it's not like this is a team full of players with no power. I won't necessarily place money down on enough of the bats getting hot at the right time but at least there's a chance if the talent on the roster performs to their capabilities.

And it couldn't be happening at a better time either. The issues with hitting with runners in scoring position is thankfully a thing of the past, but if the team can finally start hitting with the type of power that was expected of them that's a massive development with the playoffs right around the corner.

We are a little out of sync here. It appears as though I edited my post while you were responding. I've barely watched Gurriel play this season so I'm not going to make a full season determination of his outfield play based on watching him play a few times. All three major defensive metric systems rate him as being above average defensively this season. He's been steadily improving in each of these metrics season over season, so I really fail to see how you feel it's reasonable to rate his as an awful defender when you've likely watched him play a handful of times this season. He has rated as a slightly above average fielder in 3 of the last 4 seasons by Statcast fielding runs, I give that a helluva lot more credence than your style based evaluation. He's the type of player who will make the occasional blunder in the field but he seems to be capable of making enough high quality defensive plays to come out as an average if not better quality defender in the aggregate. Your eye test is suggesting the opposite of what every single defensive metric states was the case last season with regards to Matt Chapman's season. You are letting your fandom get in the way of being objective in your evaluation. I can't find the twitter thread anymore but Chris Black performed a deep dive analysis into Chapman's 2022 defensive season and came to the conclusion that he was a player who was still a very good defender but no longer elite. He showed a player who was no longer making as many of the difficult plays that he was able to make when he was younger and in his prime. If Chapman just had a platinum glove level season his metrics would have backed this up, it appears your eyes are lying to you. For what it's worth Chapman is rated as elite by DRS and above average by OAA and UZR this season. He's simply not the quality of defender he was in his prime when he was winning platinum gloves. Moreno's DRS numbers are suspect because the majority of his DRS contribution is due to him receiving the highest catcher ERA adjustment in all of MLB. I have a really hard time believing that a rookie catcher is baseball's best game caller behind the plate.

Systems like DRS and OAA aren't perfect, but unlike your small sample of games eye test actually evaluate every defensive play a fielder makes and assigns plus or minus grades based on likely outcomes with regards to relative difficulty of these plays. Giving out gold gloves based on the eye test is simply not something that would work. Who has time to watch every single inning for every player in MLB in order to hand out these awards? On the same note just because you watched a handful of games where players misplayed balls this does not somehow create a representative sample for an entire season of play. I recall Gurriel made some really nice plays against the Blue Jays in the series against the Dbacks in Toronto this season, so if I only watched those games I'd have the impression he's a great defender. Conversely Matt Chapman has had a bit of a rough month defensively since coming back from the injured list. If I were to have only watched the last few weeks of Matt Chapman innings at third base I could easily come to the conclusion that he's a bad defender at third base, but this would be far from a fair determination to make. Gurriel is a player who had a relatively late start in the outfield, and to put it mildly it was far from a smooth transition. He's improved leaps and bounds as a defender in the outfield from the ultra shaky early days when he was still learning the position. He was a legitimately terrible defender starting out and more often than not resembled a deer in headlights when fly balls were hit his way, but he's slowly turned himself into a solid defender in left field. He's been more favorably viewed by the DRS system but a big part of that was due to OAA not factoring in throwing contributions which is his primary strength in the outfield. Once you factor in throwing Gurriel now rates as an above average defender when factoring in the total defensive contributions. On the Kiermaier comparison Gurriel doesn't rate close to as highly as Kiermaier as Gurriel is credited with 11 DRS vs Kiermaier who is credited with 17 DRS.

This guy takes the miserable fan hot takes to new depths.

Looks like somebody forgot to take his meds today.

Chapman's advanced metrics weren't very good last season so if he were to win the gold glove it would have been solely based on reputation only. Chris Black had a detailed breakdown of Chapman's 2022 defensive season on Twitter and the conclusion was Chapman was a guy who was a solid but not great defender last season.

I don't get why they even had Mayza up if they had no plans to use him against Lowe. Romano was far from at his best, you have a left handed hitter who really struggles against lefties, and Mayza absolutely owns left handed hitters.

Kikuchi has been the team's second best starter for basically the last 4 months and his numbers during this period are really comparable to what Gausman has provided. I tend to think that he's earned the right to start a post season game personally.

The stellar BWAR value is largely dependant on Moreno being an elite game caller as over half of his DRS value comes from an adjusted catcher ERA stat. I'm having a really hard time believing that Moreno went from a below average game caller in 2022 to baseball's best game caller behind the plate in a single season.

That's certainly an interesting typo. I'm sure you know what I meant though.

Full agree here. I'd have zero issue with taking Chapman back on a 1 year deal if the offers in free agency aren't to his liking, and given the high likelihood he receives a multi year deal to his liking the team gets a draft pick. Having Kiermaier and Varsho on the same roster is a poor use of resources, and trusting Manoah to bounce back without a back-up plan is asking for trouble. I think he should need to earn his way back into the rotation next season and shouldn't be guaranteed anything. I used to think I'd be on board with bringing Whit back on a reasonable multi year deal, but his later season struggles at the plate have me flip flopping. He's done little to nothing at the plate for nearly 2 months as he's struggled to the tune of a 55 WRC+ dating back to the start of August. I like Schneider far more moving forward and would prefer the money it would take to retain Merrifield be used elsewhere.

Varsho in center field full time is almost certainly going to produce more overall wins above replacement in a full season given the fact that he doesn't tend to miss any games due to injury and/or load management. Varsho still has every opportunity to be better with the bat moving forward as he was largely a league average bat in his time with Arizona.

The Orioles regularly took the Blue Jays lunch money in the head to head matchups, it's a lot more than luck. I won't argue that the Orioles have massively outperformed their expected record based on run differential but they are still a very solid team. I believe if the Blue Jays play up to their capabilities they have a team that should be able to take out the Orioles in the playoffs but this is far from a given.

The positional bump alone won't be a massive change to his defensive value, but the accumulated value of his defensive contributions (at least FWAR wise) are likely going to see a massive bump. A large part of why his defensive FWAR is so low is due to the fact that Fangraphs uses Statcast OAA for their range factor, and Varsho has posted rather ordinary numbers in left field according to this metric. Shift him full time to center field and the range value is almost certain to receive a massive increase on top of the positional adjustment.

I recall Varsho mentioning how he found left field was the hardest outfield position for him to play based on the way the ball comes off of the bat. This seems to be corroborated with how his UZR/OAA numbers look pretty ordinary in left field compared to center and right field where he's graded as elite by both metrics. I fully expect Varsho to receive a massive bump in defensive value by moving to center field full time. He's actually improved his center field metrics in 2023 compared to the already stellar numbers from 2022, with massive bumps to his DRS and UZR numbers and a repeat of the stellar OAA numbers as well. I see nothing that indicates he isn't already an elite defender at the position. He accumulated as many DRS and nearly as many OAA in center field as Kiermaier in only approximately half of the innings, if that doesn't give you confidence in Varsho's standing as an elite defender at the position I really don't know what would.

It's amazing how much of an impact a bad month had on the Jays divisional record. They had a really bad month of May, where they struggled in particular against divisional opponents during the month to the tune of a 2-13 record. Outside of that month their divisional record is actually a solid 15-12, with most of these losses coming against the Orioles who really have the Jays number in head to head matchups this season.